Abstract

The COM and CORBA technologies are viewed as competing architecture for creating distributed solutions. While the most significant difference between COM and CORBA is their support for different operating system platforms, people must realize that each technology has its own strength that clearly differentiate it from the other. CORBA is considered the industry's leading standard for distributed objects and it's the dominant remoting architecture. COM is primarily a component architecture rather than a remoting architecture. The decade-old rivalry between Microsoft and Java development communities enters a new phase. Two major application platforms now dominate the enterprise application development market: Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) and the Microsoft .NET platform. The decision about which platform to use is a business decision, but technology factors can have significant business impacts. The paper reviews, examines these candidate architectures, and analyzes the similarities and differences between DCOM and CORBA, EJB and MTS, from a programmer's standpoint and an architectural standpoint. The paper provides an in-depth comparison of the .NET and J2EE platforms, analyzes their key advantages and disadvantages to support decision making for building enterprise solutions.